You are here

Time for ADCs

The CMOS scaling has brought forth many advantages in the context of digital circuits, but not so as much in the analog/mixed-signal world. One critical challenge is designing efficient and high gain Opamps in scaled CMOS processes. To make matters worse, the reduced voltage margin degrades the overall performance, especially in high resolution ADCs. Consequently, the overall resolution of the ADCs has been reduced in scaled nodes. Among various types of ADCs, delta-sigma modulators are the most commonly used oversampled ADCs to achieve high conversion resolutions using moderately accurate analog building blocks. Recently, continuous-time delta-sigma modulators have gained increased popularity due to their superior performance in terms of power consumption, anti-aliasing filtering and conversion speed. The core of these structures embodies active-RC integrators to form the loop filter, followed by the quantizer. Prof. Nima Maghari will present an alternative and drastically more efficient approach to implement the quantizer in order to directly benefit from CMOS process scaling in delta-sigma modulators.

Speaker

Nima Maghari

University of Florida

Nima Maghari received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran, in 2004 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 2010.

He is currently an assistant professor at the school of electrical and computer engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville. From 2004 to 2006, he was with IC-LAB, University of Tehran, where he was involved with audio delta-sigma converters and low-voltage bandgap references. In 2008 he was recipient of CICC-AMD outstanding student paper award. He has served as an Associated Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-I and the technical program committee of IEEE CICC. He has published more than 40 conference and journals papers in IEEE and IEE.